Cellular-related quality of service (“QoS”) issues are a significant source of frustration for service providers as well as their customers. Common QoS issues include bandwidth limitations, jitter, delay and latency, packet loss, and interference. QoS issues may result in a number of problems for customers, potentially causing customers to change service providers. In one example, a customer may experience a “dropped call,” in which a phone call unexpectedly ends. In another example, a customer may experience a slow data transfer rate that is not suitable for transferring high-bandwidth content, such as video and music. QoS problems may result in unacceptable quality of service, causing customer dissatisfaction ranging from annoyance to anger.
A cellular network generally includes a plurality of cells, each of which is associated with a cellular tower. Each cellular tower may provide service for a number of cellular devices within a range of the associated cell. The quality of service provided by the cellular tower may be limited by its available bandwidth and other cellular resources. As such, the cellular network may limit the number of devices connected to the network. A conventional method for limiting access to the cellular network is connection admission control (“CAC”). Generally, CAC admits and denies a new connection based on available bandwidth and other network resources of the cellular tower. However, the determination whether to admit or deny a new connection is typically made for only one cellular device at a time without regard to other cellular devices.